Splat Guy | Hiroshima Splat

Procrastinating a bit, and found this blog.

Really good, short, article on why petrol prices are good right where they are. Whatever they are.

I'd like to see a study into relative levels of petrol prices - US at 85c per litre, AUS at $1.30 per litre, Europe at... $3 or $4 per litre. Is there any benefit to a certain level of petrol price, or is it a zero sum game? Any ideas, link me up!

Not so sure about his views on VSU, but it's his opinion, not mine. Even though he's using the same template as me.

Home Loan Interest

Figured it out... ING Bank actually calculate simple daily interest, charged - and compounded - monthly. I presumed they calculated interest compounded daily and charged monthly.

Their Terms and Conditions are ambiguous on that point, I think.

"7) How We Calculate Interest
We calculate interest each day by applying
the daily
percentage rate to the amount you owe us at the
end of that day.
The daily percentage rate is equal to
the interest rate applicable to your
loan on that day
divided by 365. The end of each day for
calculating
interest charges is 5.00pm Sydney time."

National Australia Bank has a worked example on this page. This is an example of Lean Consumption, Womack and Jones' next crusade.

Palm problems :(

My new Tungsten died last week. :( It reset itself in the middle of reading a book, and when it returned the screen colours were inverted, and it was responding very slowly. Hard resets had no effect. One for the RMA bin. Hopefully the replacement won't take long to arrive.

It was one of a batch my workplace supplied. One of my colleagues found an interesting bug - when a Find query returns more than 8 contacts / addresses, pressing "More" displays the same 8 contacts over and over. It's detailed here:

Solution ID: 38782

I found the information on CNET, and have to agree with the poster: suggesting a US$14.95 application to fix core functionality isn't acceptable. (The T5 has a software update to fix the problem, the E2 does not. Both run PalmOS Garnet 5.4 - but so does the LifeDrive, which is not mentioned in the knowledgebase article. )

Palm Tungsten E2 Bluetooth Personal Area Network using BlueSoleil

I have just acquired a Palm Tungsten E2, which comes with Bluetooth. My bluetooth dongle comes with BlueSoleil software. It has a Personal Area Network (PAN) service, through which you can share an internet connection (ICS).

There is a good guide which shows how to use Microsoft bluetooth drivers to do ICS in this way - see here.

However, I would like to use the BlueSoleil software. Mostly this is because my home network uses DHCP and ICS requires a fixed IP on the host computer. If I could connect through BlueSoleil I could use my home computer, my laptop at home or my laptop at work to get internet connectivity to my Tungsten.

Does anyone know if it can be done? The BlueSoleil FAQ indicates it might be possible in the next version.

This looks promising: PalmZone Reading it now. :)

Banks...

Commonwealth Bank still hasn't got back to me. I've since figured out the cause of the problem - if they get back to me I'll tell them what it is and what would fix it.

However, I've discovered an issue with the way ING Bank calculates interest on my home loan. I'm pretty sure they're doing themselves out of $20 per annum for every $100,000 they have lent. The call centre doesn't seem very interested, and their website doesn't provide a way for me to contact them electronically.

My charity runs out when I have to dig out their address and mail them a hard copy.... I'll keep the $20 and that of everyone else who has a loan, thanks.